Who’s in Washington Purgatory?

For the past 900 days—nearly three years—Ken Kopocis has been languishing in the bureaucratic equivalent of Guantánamo Bay: The longtime congressional staffer is waiting to be confirmed as President Barack Obama’s nominee to oversee clean water regulations at the Environmental Protection Agency. And for that entire time, the exceedingly low-profile pick (“whitest white bread” is how a pal describes him) has had his nomination held up by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who was concerned that Clean Water Act enforcement would slow big private-sector projects, including a major Alaskan gold and copper mine. So, Kopocis knots the tie every day and heads to the EPA as a consultant, where he’s forced to defer to career civil service officials on major issues, effectively robbing Obama’s team of direct operational control of an important portfolio.

If misery loves company, Kopocis has plenty—a haggard holding pattern full of White House picks for jobs great and small, ranging from the head of the Federal Reserve to a slew of deputy’s deputies in federal agencies. The practice of sitting on presidential picks might not be new—Democrats bottled up close to 200 nominees in George W. Bush’s last year—but seldom have there been so many appointments languishing in limbo. According the White House, close to 250 presidential appointments are currently waiting for confirmation. (For the full list, see below.) A fact sheet put together by Senate Democrats calculates the average wait for all the appointees—executive department nominees and judicial ones combined—at about 160 days. Strikingly, the 228-day average wait for judicial appointments represents a new record (though, just barely: Democrats stalled Bush’s bench appointees by an average of 211 days, according to the GOP Senate Judiciary Committee staff).

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) decision to invoke the “nuclear option” in late November was geared at clearing the way for the judicial nominees—an especially important group whose lifetime tenure gives them the capacity to shape law long after Obama is gone. The nuke threat ensures pre-holiday floor votes for the administration’s highest-profile nominees for non-judicial posts, people including Janet Yellen, picked to helm the Federal Reserve; Mel Watt, tapped to oversee the federal Housing Administration; and Jeh Johnson, who will soon become the secretary of homeland security. But administration and congressional aides say the course ahead is less clear for many of the picks lower on the totem pole; Senate Democrats are hoping to settle accounts on many of these nominees through the usual backchannel negotiations with angry Republicans.

The stalling is not all the fault of the GOP: Many of the more recent nominees—around 140 of them—are bottled up in Democrat-controlled Senate committees for sundry reasons, including White House foot-dragging, a flurry of pre-hearing queries from Senators or simple scheduling conflicts within the committees. “Despite the inflated claims, the overwhelming majority of nominations aren’t even pending before the Senate—they’re still in Democrat-led committees,” says Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “We can’t block nominees that aren’t even here.”

The human resource pinch caused by these machinations is especially acute at the State Department—a problem exacerbated by the post-Hillary Clinton departure of many top Foggy Bottom officials, and Secretary of State John Kerry’s prioritization of global troubleshooting over the time-consuming slog of re-staffing. Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), has placed holds on a number of key State Department nominations in hopes of extracting more information on the 2012 attack at the American mission in Benghazi. In the days leading up to Reid’s nuclear threat, Foggy Bottom officials had brokered some movement for a few nominees. But several remain as high priorities for the Democrats, as this roster—culled from a series of “top-10” lists submitted to Politico Magazine by Senate aides and administration officials—shows.

***

1. Michael Connor, deputy secretary, Department of the Interior

Nominated July 30, 2013

Democrats claim it was Vitter who placed a hold on Obama’s pick for the Interior Department’s critical number two – which a Vitter spokesman denies. Either way, it’s a position that has become a flashpoint for conservative griping over limitations on logging, mining and the like.

2. Rose Gottemoeller, under secretary of state for arms control and international security

Nominated May 31, 2013

Non-proliferation veteran Gottemoeller, who is currently serving as “acting” under secretary, isn’t a controversial pick, but she has been caught in the general slow-walk – and has yet to earn a vote on the Senate floor.